First, an apology. The National may have suggested there was a possibility that Willie Bain could be the only Labour MP left in Scotland. One person who took some exception to our front page yesterday, and emailed us to say so, was Anne McLaughlin, the SNP candidate standing against Bain.

We got in touch with her. “Och, I actually quite like it. I don’t mind if he thinks that he’ll cling on and if the rest of the Labour machinery ignores the constituency as they have done for years, because it’s not what we’re hearing from the thousands of doors we’ve been canvassing. We keep hearing, ‘I’ve always voted Labour but now I’m voting SNP’ and that’s across all age groups.”

McLaughlin, pictured out campaigning with actor Tam Dean Burn, is not new to the world of politics, she was an MSP between 2009 and 2011 and has stood as a candidate a few times. In Glasgow North East, the constituency she’s contesting against Bain, the breakdown of the referendum vote, showed huge patches of Yes voters.

The referendum, says McLaughlin, is still fresh for a lot of voters. “One thing I keep hearing is, ‘I can’t get the image out of my mind of Labour standing campaigning with the Tories’. People here really strongly object to that,” she says.The seat has been Labour since 1935.

It would have been Labour since 1922, but in 1931 Charles Ernest George Campbell Emmott won it for the Tories by 34 votes. In fact that’s also not quite true, the seat was held by Michael Martin who was the Speaker of the House of Commons between 2000 and 2009.

As Speaker Martin was not a member of any political party. It also meant that at election time, as convention dictated, the other parties did not stand against the Speaker. Except that the SNP did, as their constitution demands that the party stand in every seat. It was never personal, but even then the SNP never really increased their vote.

The constituency takes in the slowly gentrifying Dennistoun with its organic, artisan bakeries and gastropubs, and goes out to Springburn and Possilpark, two of the poorest areas in Scotland, where unemployment and crime statistics remain high.

“The lack of jobs, the huge number of people who are depending on benefits and suffering from benefits sanctions, these are the key issues,” McLaughlin says. McLaughlin says that Labour have let the constituency down: “In this area people haven’t seen any improvement since Willie became the MP.”

The news that 29 per cent of voters certain to vote have yet to decide is no surprise to McLaughlin. She and her canvassers find that in their returns the don’t knows are in second place in the constituency, after the SNP and ahead of Labour.

Although the findings of the TNS poll were a relief, it meant that all the don’t knows her team were finding were not just secret Labour voters hiding their true intentions.Anne, who spent last night canvassing with the actor Tam Dean Burn, says that there’s been no evidence of tactical voting in the constituency to keep the SNP.

The voters, McLaughlin says, are solidly Labour or SNP. “Personally I’ve spoken to three Tories and one Ukip”, she says, “It wasn’t until our 25th canvassing that we found a Lib Dem.”